Welcome to the Hip Replacement Podcast, where recovery meets motivation and healing leads to a whole new lifestyle.
I'm Chris Bystriansky, your host. I'm an author, athlete, and double hip replacement patient. I've been through the surgeries, the setbacks, and the comebacks. And I'm here to help you do the same.
Each week, I'll bring you tips, tools, expert advice, and inspiring stories to help you take back your life one step at a time.
Thanks for joining the Hip Replacement Podcast. New hips, new you. Let's go.
Welcome back to the Hip Replacement Podcast. I'm Chris Bystriansky, your host. I'm also a two-time hip replacement patient, one more than 12 years ago and the other more than 10 years ago. And I'm here to share my experiences with you. Hopefully, it's helpful as you progress in your life following a hip replacement.
I want to tell you the story first. Um, I used to fly a lot. And what I mean by a lot was that I used to fly from Houston, Texas to Chicago, Illinois a lot. And it was this one portion of my flight history was 110 round trips in under three years. So in about two and a half, a little over two and a half years. So that's a lot of flights. That's a lot of roundtrip flights.
And the reason I was doing that was that I was going to get my business degree, my MBA, my masters of business administration degree from the University of Chicago. And I did that while I was living in Houston. Yes, I lived in one state and I flew to go to school in a different state.
And what I did was I organized all my classes on Friday nights or afternoons and Saturday morning or Saturday afternoon. And I would fly from Houston to Chicago on Friday morning and then I would fly back on Saturday night. 110 round trips.
And I remember this one time coming home on Saturday night. I would take the last flight out from Chicago to Houston. It was about, I think, 8:00ish leaving Chicago. And I wasn't the only one. There was probably four to six to eight people who were doing the exact same thing on that same plane.
So, a lot of people living around the country would go to the University of Chicago and they would fly in, take their classes and fly out or long drive or what have you.
But I remember this one particular flight coming home. The pilot gets on the intercom before we take off and he goes over the general spiel about the flight, what the weather's going to be like, if they're expecting turbulence, what the altitude they're going to be flying at, the name of the flight attendants on the plane.
And then he said something that really was striking. He said the computer on the plane. They always tell you this. He said the computer says it's going to take 2 hours and 2 minutes from wheels up to wheels down. So the computer said it was supposed to take 2 hours and 2 minutes for the flight.
But then the pilot, maybe out of bravado, said, "Although the computer says it's going to take two hours and two minutes, I can do it in an hour and a half."
Okay. I thought that was pretty brave, pretty uh macho, I guess, thing to say. Sure enough, one and a half hours later, we touched down in Houston.
Now, I thought that was great because it was getting to be late on a Saturday night. I wanted to get home. I know everyone else on that plane wanted to get to where they were going to go. I know the pilots probably wanted to get home. The flight attendants probably wanted to get home.
And it was fantastic that they were able to reach the destination much faster than the scheduled time.
Now, in that situation, it makes sense to hurry up because the skies were clear, the weather was good, there was not a lot of traffic in the air, so there's not a lot of other planes. It was the last flight out of Chicago to Houston and we all wanted to get to where we wanted to go.
It made perfect sense to not follow the schedule and to hurry up and get to the finish line, which was our destination. Made perfect sense then.
But do you know when it doesn't make any sense to rush?
When you're recovering from a hip replacement surgery. That's when it's good if you can increase the pace of a flight. Not good if you want to increase the recovery process following a hip replacement surgery.
So let me ask you this.
How many of you are racing to get through your recovery?
So that's the subject of today's podcast episode. And this episode was suggested by listener Jeff. And Jeff, thank you so much for listening and for sending in a message about this particular topic.
And if you have a topic you would like discussed, just send me a message. There's a link in the show notes to the podcast web page and from that web page, you can simply send in a message.
So, let me ask you that question again.
How many of you are racing to get through your recovery?
Be honest with yourself. How many of you are counting days, tracking weeks, and asking, "When can I get back to normal? When can I walk farther? When can I get back to the gym? When can I get back to playing golf or pickle ball or tennis or run or bike or whatever it is?"
Some things I see on social media every once in a while. I don't comment much. I do take a look once in a while.
One of the things that I see, one of the topics that I see over and over again is how long is this going to take? Can I travel two weeks after? Can I do X? Can I do this run in three, four weeks after?
And that whole mindset is unfortunately incredibly common after a hip replacement.
But you know what? I get it. I really do.
You're tired of being limited. You want your life back. You want momentum again. You don't want to feel like an invalid. You want independence. I felt all of that stuff, but I knew there was a better way.
And today I want to challenge the way you're thinking about getting better, about recovery. Because if there's one message that needs to be drilled into people recovering from a hip replacement surgery, it's this.
Slow down. It's okay to slow down. It's encouraged to slow down.
And no, this is not going to be a motivational poster message. This is a strategic decision that will affect how you move, how you feel, and how long the hips are going to last and your comfort for years.
Let me ask you a question that a lot of people never stop to consider.
What do you actually gain by doing in four weeks what should take six weeks or eight weeks? Seriously, what do you gain?
Why rush the recovery if this new hip is supposed to last 20, 30, maybe even more years? What's the upside of rushing through the first six to eight weeks or 12 weeks?
Because when you really think about it, the math doesn't work. Why trade a quick burst in the first four, six, eight weeks when there's something better farther down the line in the long run.
The risks are very real.
You risk lingering pain if you try to rush things. If you're doing things too quickly, if you're trying to get to a point of you're not worried about this hip replacement or you want to ditch the crutches or the cane or the walker, you risk lingering pain.
You risk poor movement patterns. You risk inflammation that never fully settles down and it's going to nag and nag and nag.
You risk compensations that turn into habits like that limp you develop that never seems to go away.
You risk not knowing how to heal yourself, how to fix issues when they come up six months, 12 months, two years, three years, four years down the line.
You risk spending months or even years trying to undo things, aches and pains and limps that should never have happened in the first place.
So, this is where I'm going to say something very blunt, and I do this out of love, okay? This is a love message.
Slow the flip down.
I'm not saying that to scare you. I say it because people don't hear it often enough or they don't take it to heart.
And if you're paying attention to social media at all, which I don't recommend you do too much of, we see the opposite message in social media. People post stuff there that they're doing all these amazing things in the weeks following surgery or in the first few months following surgery or they're ditching the cane or the crutches or the walker and they're going up and down stairs. They're going for walks, they're going for long drives, they're doing all these exciting things.
Don't let that guide you. All right? Be on your own pace and take it easy.
Because here's a reality check. Consider this.
Professional or serious athletes in peak physical condition, people whose entire lives revolve around training, they lose entire seasons. They lose a year for a broken leg. If they get injured, they take the time to get better. They lose months, even years.
That's with worldclass medical care, strength, discipline, motivation, great food, and all the support they can possibly need to get them back to a position where they can play.
And somehow, if a serious athlete has an injury and takes a year to recover from a broken leg, somehow the average person in their 40s, 50s, maybe even 60s that has a hip replacement surgery thinks they're going to bounce back from this major joint surgery in two, three, or four weeks because they feel pretty good at the time.
Really?
Consider even professional baseball pitchers or high school baseball pitchers, college baseball pitchers, or professional baseball pitchers for a second.
Baseball pitchers don't throw every day. They don't pitch every day. They only pitch about once every five days and then they go through a cycle of rest, of stretching, of exercises, of drills to get them back so that on the fifth day they're ready to go at their peak performance.
They're not able to throw every day, not because they don't want to pitch more, but because they understand that recovery is part of the performance.
All the doctors, all their trainers, the team owners, the team managers, the coaches, they all know that this pitcher is not going to perform unless they take the rest and do the exercises to put them back in a position to perform at their best about every five days.
Occasionally in emergencies they'll pitch on shorter rest and shorter time period. Sometimes they'll do it in four days, rarely in three days, but when they do it's a big deal. It's all over the news. People are talking about it and it's a calculated decision by the team if a pitcher goes on short rest because it's risky.
The risk is that they could damage their arm or damage their shoulder or simply not be anywhere near the pitcher that they would be if they had better rest.
Why? Because they know, and the team knows, that the body needs time to heal, to adapt, and to recover.
Yet somehow after a hip replacement, people expect their body to ignore those same biological rules of rest and recovery. It simply doesn't work that way.
It doesn't work that way no matter how many people post on social media of all the incredible things that they're doing. It doesn't work that way. If you want to go faster, it just doesn't. The biology says this is how long it's going to take. This is what needs to be corrected. And that takes time.
One of the biggest mistakes people make is asking the wrong question. And here's the typical question that people ask when they're faced with a hip replacement surgery.
How long does recovery take?
And that's simply the wrong question.
It's like, you ever have you ever been in a car with kids and you're going on a road trip and they constantly ask, "Are we there yet? We just left. Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" 30 minutes into a six-hour drive. Are we there yet? One hour into that drive. Are we there yet?
The kids in the back seat are impatient asking, "Are we there yet?"
And that reminds me a lot of people who've had their hips replaced.
Are we there yet? Are we done with the recovery yet? How long is this going to take?
It doesn't make a car trip any shorter. It doesn't make a hip replacement recovery any shorter. It just makes everyone miserable.
Instead, enjoy the journey. Gain something from the journey and the time that you're going to be in the back seat or sitting in a car on a plane, enjoying the journey to get where you want to go.
Same thing with a hip replacement surgery. Enjoy the journey of the recovery.
Don't worry about the finish line.
A better question you can ask is this.
What can I do to get the best recovery possible?
And that question shifts everything. It's no longer a timing issue. It's a quality issue because recovery is not just a finish line that you cross.
It's a process that you build.
The recovery is not simply at the 90-day mark or three-month mark or you finished all of the physical therapy and then you're recovered, you're done. That is not a finish line. It's a much longer process.
And here's something else people don't expect.
Recovery is not a linear process.
And what I mean by that is the improvement does not happen at a steady, predictable pace or rate. It goes up and down.
There will be weeks when you feel great. There will be days when your hip, your legs, your back feel stiff, sore, or you're frustrated for no obvious reason because you don't know what's going on.
There will be periods when progress seems to stall and then there's going to be other moments when suddenly you feel stronger or more confident.
That doesn't mean that something is wrong. That means your body is going through a natural process of adapting, of feeling these aches and pains because you're using it in a way that you haven't in a long time.
If you expect constant improvement, that every day is going to get better and every week is going to get better, you're going to feel like you're failing even when you're quietly healing.
Now let's talk about the real enemy here. And this is something that we all have to deal with to a certain extent. And this is the enemy of a great recovery.
Are you ready for it? Some people are not going to like this.
The real enemy of a great recovery is ego.
Ego ruins more recoveries than bad doctors or bad surgeons or bad implants ever will.
People go too fast because they're trying to prove something. They want to show they're doing great, how awesome they are. They want to show they're ahead of some schedule. And they want to show that they're not like other patients.
And that's great. Everyone recovers at a different rate. But here's the truth.
Let your ego take a rest. Take a back seat. And then take it out in a year.
Let the ego fly a year from now. Not six weeks, not four weeks from surgery. A year later when you're doing things exceptionally with no pain and you have all the strength and flexibility and confidence you want.
That stuff doesn't apply at four weeks. Let the ego fly in a year when the work has been put in, when your body has had time to heal, when you can function normally.
Another trap that we fall into besides ego is comparison.
Have you ever found yourself comparing yourself to someone else? Maybe looking online and being like, "Oh my gosh, they're doing X activity at four weeks or one month or two month and I'm nowhere near there. I'm still in pain. It still hurts here. I'm still using an aid to walk."
That's a serious trap. And that is a keeping up with the Joneses recovery. Like your neighbors got something great, so you have to also have that great thing, that new car, that new whatever it is.
So, you got to keep up with them. Serious trap here.
You hear someone walked three miles at four weeks after surgery. Someone else ditched their cane or their crutch or their walker early. Someone else went back to the gym faster.
But the reality is they're different bodies. They're different histories. They're different surgeries. They're different surgeons. There was different damage before surgery. There were different starting points in their health and there's different egos.
So, you may read something or hear a story about somebody who did this incredible thing shortly after surgery, but maybe you don't hear what happens a year or two later.
So, borrowing someone else's timeline is a guaranteed way to mess up your own timeline.
I play a lot of golf and I don't hit the ball as long as a lot of people out there. Great players, most of them hit the ball a long way. I don't hit the ball anywhere near that far, even though my scores are about the same.
If I try to hit the ball as far as they do, it completely destroys my game and I will have a terrible score. I need to play my game, my strategy with my skills.
Everybody going through hip surgery recovery needs to be on their own timeline and not try to match someone else's timeline.
Another trap, another pitfall, so to speak, is denial.
And what I mean by that is minimizing the severity of what just happened, of what you just went through. Thinking that, oh, it was just a hip replacement. It's no big deal. I've had worse.
Actually, you've had major orthopedic surgery.
Respecting that reality isn't weakness. It's intelligence.
Why risk the next 20 or 30 years or even more because you didn't want to slow down for the first six months?
And make no mistake about it, the first six months matter way more than most people realize.
This is when the bone is integrating with the implant, when the muscles and the tendons are healing, when your nervous system is relearning movement.
There was a time when I felt off balance for six months, a year after surgery because I was just trying to figure out my body and my brain were just trying to understand my new spatial relationships. So I had to relearn that and that just took time.
And in this first six months, this is when habits are formed, good or bad.
If you rush here, you usually don't break something dramatically. It's not going to be a sharp like, oh, at that point I knew exactly that something bad happened. That can happen.
But what's worse is what actually happens.
If you don't take the time at the beginning to go slow and let your body heal and go through the recovery process, do the exercises, you're slowly sabotaging yourself.
The damage you're causing is festering underneath. It's not something dramatic. It's something that just shows up in the rest of your body over time.
That limp that never quite goes away. A movement you avoid without realizing it. A pain that pops when it shouldn't. Confidence that never fully returns.
You don't ruin a hip replacement in one bad day. You can, of course, you could fall or have an accident or dislocate it, of course, but most of the injuries are subtle and they take a long time to show up.
You ruin a hip replacement by stacking small bad decisions over a long period of time.
Now, let's talk about exercises and physical therapy for a moment.
Doing the exercises and stretches correctly and slowly and patiently matters. The form matters.
The rehab is not about sweating or getting a great workout. It's not about how tired you are.
It's about retraining very specific muscles in very specific locations to do very specific jobs again.
If your form is sloppy because you're in a hurry, because no one is correcting you, because no one's gave you the right exercises to do, you're not fixing a problem. You're reinforcing the problem, which is a big long-term issue.
10 perfect reps beat 50 bad ones every single time. And when I say reps, I mean the number of times you do an exercise, okay?
And that takes patience and understanding that this is a long recovery process and two weeks, four weeks, six weeks is not going to cut it.
That first month is really where the patience shows up or it doesn't.
Because doing things correctly and slowly is boring. Going slow is boring. Repeating basic movements is boring.
But boring is how you rebuild a body that works the way you want it to in as little pain as possible.
Now I want to ask you a question, and ask yourself some honest questions.
Are you still limping?
Are you feeling any sharp pains anywhere?
Are you avoiding certain movements because you don't feel quite right?
Are you saying, "I'm good enough. I still have this pain or that pain, but I feel good enough."
It actually probably could be a lot better.
And all of these things, the limp, the sharp pains, the avoiding the simple movements because they don't feel right, these aren't things to push through. They're signals. They're signals from your body.
Signals to slow down, to reassess, signals to adjust, make some adjustments in what you're doing or not doing, but not quitting. You're not going to quit the recovery process.
And let me be clear about this.
Going slowly does not mean doing nothing. Like sitting on the couch is not going to get you anywhere.
It means doing the right things at the right time for the right reasons.
It means respecting being tired, respecting fatigue. It means giving your body time for the swelling to settle down instead of fighting through it.
It means understanding that strength and confidence are built gradually. They're not forced. They're not rushed.
Ironically, people who go slower early almost always move faster later because they set the foundation and they've given their body time to heal and then they can increase strength faster later because they're not constantly dealing with setbacks.
And some of the setbacks you might not feel. You might not feel the muscles not working the way they're supposed to work. You might not feel that slight limp.
Trying to make up time and rush things at the beginning almost always backfires.
A small strain in the legs or the back or a flare up can cost you weeks later or a fall can cost you months later or longer.
And consistency beats intensity every time in recovery.
You've heard the story of the tortoise and the hare about how they set off on a race and the arrogant hare runs ahead and thinks that he has so much of a lead because he's so quick and so smart that his ego gives him the excuse to sit down and rest.
And the tortoise slowly and surely and consistently plods forward and eventually passes the sleeping hare and eventually beats the hare to the finish line.
Slow and steady wins.
Here's the bottom line.
Going slow is not weakness. It's discipline. It's maturity. It's patience. It's long-term thinking.
I would rather have huge successes years down the road than a couple short-term risky wins early.
You don't win recovery by finishing early. You win by finishing strong and staying strong for the rest of your life.
If you take nothing else from this episode, remember this.
You're not just recovering from surgery. You are recovering from years of your muscles not being used correctly. Your back, your legs, and you'll be building the body you'll live in for decades. For decades, for the rest of your life.
Why risk something too quick?
So treat your body accordingly. Go slow, go smart.
I know it's hard to be patient going through the recovery process when you see some people, they seem to be going so fast and you feel like you're behind, but you're not.
Be on your schedule. Go at your pace. Continuously get better slowly. Patience. Patience in that first six months to the year because after that you will be able to do whatever you want to do.
I hope this is helpful as you get stronger, more confident and more capable to do all the things you want to do in your long life.
That's it for us today for this episode today. I have something very special for you. We're going to do something different next time. So, I have something special for you in the next episode. Be on the lookout for that.
Thanks so much for tuning in to the Hip Replacement Podcast and until next time, I wish you the best recovery possible.
Take care.
